Cristina Odone is a journalist, novelist and broadcaster specialising in the relationship between society, families and faith. She is the director of communications for the Legatum institute and is a former editor of the Catholic Herald and deputy editor of the New Statesman. She is married and lives in west London with her husband, two stepsons and a daughter. Her new ebook No God Zone is now available on Kindle.

Assisted suicide: a wealthy elite will push vulnerable people to premature death

If we were to overturn the present law banning assisted suicide, 1,000 Britons would die in this way every year. Living and Dying Well, the new think tank that has made this calculation, is right to raise the alarm. But my concern is not the numbers who would turn to assisted suicide; rather, I am worried about who these potential suicides are.

Prompted by a harrowing experience with my father, who asked me to help him die when he lay suffering in a hospital ward, I've spent the past year researching a pamphlet on this issue. I became more and more convinced, as I spoke to doctors, nurses, and lawyers, that the push for assisted suicide came from a strident elite. This group, articulate, well-off (or at least well-educated) and very much part of the system, knows exactly how to protect their interests. No one can push them around — certainly no one can push them into dying prematurely.

But there is another group, a much bigger one. It is made up of Britons who, either because of their condition, education or income, do not control the levers of the system. They are very vulnerable to pressure from their family and friends, but also from authority figures — who belong, needless to say, to the elite. Should their spouse hint at exhaustion, after years of caring for them, or their grand-children start muttering about how much better off they would be if granny left them a little something for their studies, or, more sinister, should they feel that, in hospital, the medics are rolling their eyes at this bed-blocker taking up so much valuable time, care and attention, this group is likely to put up their hands and say, right, I'm going, don't worry, I'll spare you the trouble.

Little by little, we would start expecting this acceptance of premature death. Our culture would shift from catering for the disadvantaged to killing them off. The image of Florence Nightingale hovering lovingly by the patient's bed will give way to another image, of an impatient nurse, looking at her watch, tapping her foot, clearing her throat in a pointed hint: just push off, will you?